I just signed up after hearing the BBC World Service Discovery show about Rosetta@home. I think it's a fantastic idea to use spare computer memory across the world. Does anyone know roughly how many PCs are in this project. Also, my girlfriend is a long term Hepatitis B carrier with no symptoms. Could this project one day help find a cure for hepatitis B. Andrew in London

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I just signed up after hearing the BBC World Service Discovery show about Rosetta@home. I think it's a fantastic idea to use spare computer memory across the world. Does anyone know roughly how many PCs are in this project. Also, my girlfriend is a long term Hepatitis B carrier with no symptoms. Could this project one day help find a cure for hepatitis B. Andrew in London

Hello and welcome aboard! You can find statistics about Rosetta@Home here: http://boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=rosetta

I'm not aware of any projects using Rosetta@home to specifically address Hepatitis B, but the information gained from the project could help a wide variety of diseases. If scientists could reliably and easily discover the 3-dimensional shape of proteins from their DNA sequences (which is largely known) and then design other proteins (drugs) to interact with theses proteins, the results would be revolutionary.

There are projects using Rosetta@home to target specific diseases, but I like to think of it like research aimed at building a better microscope--i.e. improving a tool used by a wide variety of applications.

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According to www.boincstats.com, the number of "hosts" (i.e. computers) connected are around 182000, 62000 of those have reported results in the last week (which is what BoincStats call "active"). This number isn't entirely accurate, since there's several of those "inactive" computers that are "the same computer" but signed up at different times...

The number of people "running" those computers are 82336, of which 34506 are active users. So on average, each user has just under 2 active computers, but most users have one, and some have many (dozens and more in some cases).

The "cures" to be found by Rosetta and it's related research is difficult to predict, but it's certainly no bad thing to use the processing power of computers that are currently not heavily used to figure out how various proteins behave and potentially come up with a cure for X, Y or Z.

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Mats

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Hi according to the 'Disease Related Research' page from the front page, they currently are or are collaborating with people to investigate Malaria, Anthrax, HIV, Alzheimer, Cancer (including Prostate)
I know at another now finished project using virtual screening called find-a-drug (www.find-a-drug.biz) we also looked at these and other areas. We certainly found possible HIV and Cancer and Malaria, so these projects do advance science and work.

At that project we did look at possible Hepatitis targets (I think C though), They where done under a 'proteome' category, since there was nobody to collaborate with at the time. THAT is the main stumbling block in most of these project (well apart from time ;-)).

I do not know of any distributed computin project trying to target Hep.B.

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Team mauisun.org